Real Talk: Antya Waegemann, Product Designer & Founder of Redesign the Kit
Antya Waegemann is a Product Designer & Founder of Redesign the Kit, a sexual assault kit designed to drastically improve the experience for both survivors and nurses.
I featured Antya’s great work in the first-ever issue of “The Weekly” and reached out to her to learn more. In this issue of “Real Talk”, we spoke about what inspired her to take on such a big challenge, what her design process looks like, how she stays inspired and much more.
Enjoy!
Zack
Hey Antya. How’s it going? Where are you and what are you feeling right now?
It’s going! I’m currently in Brooklyn, NY and while I feel lucky that everyone I know is healthy, it’s very claustrophobic here and working from home is actually really hard.
Seeing your work reminded me of the importance of good design during life-changing moments. Can you tell us what inspired you to take on such a difficult challenge?
This project began as a Master’s thesis at the School of Visual Arts. As someone who had transitioned into design from urban planning and policy, I really fell in love with design and saw what a major impact it could have on complex issues in a way that policy just couldn’t. I’ve always been really passionate about gender equality and women’s issues and when I heard about the untested rape kits on the news, it just hit me so clearly that this had to be a design problem.
As I started to learn more about the responses to sexual assault, it was way worse than I ever could have imagined. I believe that design can really shift the way we respond to sexual assault victims, hopefully starting with a redesign of the kit and the introduction of an app.
What did your design process look like?
I began spending a summer reading about sexual assault, rape kits, and the justice system in the United States. I started to quickly realize and map out who was involved in the aftermath of an assault because it was so complex.
There are about 5 “collaborators:”
The victim
The nurse/doctor
The forensic teams
The police
A social worker
There are also detectives, lawyers and many other people that surround the sexual assault kit in some way. As a Master’s thesis, I decided that I not only needed to redesign the kit but to consider all of these collaborators and think about how to make the process better for all of them. If it was working then victims should be getting justice and having a better experience, but currently, they aren’t.
I began speaking with subject matter experts and sexual assault victims before prototyping and running design sprints around the insights I had learned. I held a co-creation session to learn from women what they knew about kits, if they knew how to get them and what they wanted them to look like. From there, I continued to design and re-design.
Although this project started as a year-long exploration for your master’s in Product Design, you decided to take it further and founded Redesign the Kit in May 2019. How are you progressing and what’s the long term ambition?
It’s a very slow process and I’m learning a lot about the entrepreneurial world. Because this is a social impact project, it will be a slow climb to success. In order for the new kit to appear in hospitals, it will need the approval of doctors, nurses and city officials, which is not an easy ask.
The long term ambition is to create a redesigned kit that is so seamless for doctors and nurses to use that it can reach every hospital and health clinic in the US. (Currently, kits are only in about 20% of hospitals.) There are so many victims that choose not to report or get a kit because they’re afraid of the emergency room or don’t have access to a place that they trust with kits. One day, these could be available at a local pharmacy clinic and eventually even become a service where trained nurses could come to victims’ homes or preferred locations to collect the kits.
You also have a day job. How do you find a balance between this and your work on Redesign the Kit?
It’s hard! I think having the opportunities to speak about the kit at Design Indaba and show it during Dubai Design Week have certainly helped me stay motivated, but it’s hard to build a team and to prototype on the side. The goal is to continue to apply for funding and to pitch at competitions so that hopefully in the near future I can work on it full time.
We read the article your sister wrote about living in lockdown in Baghdad, whilst working for an NGO. Is it fair to say that helping others runs in the family?
Yeah, it certainly is! My mother was a Protestant/Non-denominational Minister growing up so I suppose unconsciously that’s where we got it from. She never once pushed religion on us and gave us such an interfaith background that we learned very early how to be open to other people and cultures. I think when you’re raised by a woman whose whole life is about giving and helping others, you absorb that.
How are you adapting to this new reality of ours?
It’s definitely been a transition and it’s frustrating because in New York it’s clear that people aren’t staying inside as they should. I’m trying to remember that we are sheltering in place whilst trying to work and not simply working from home. There is a lot of pressure to get things done but also so much uncertainty about the future.
I feel truly grateful to be healthy, to have a job and to have access to many things other people don’t, but I would do anything for a backyard, a balcony or just one extra room!
How do you stay inspired?
I mostly stay inspired by continuing to connect with my friends and family. This time also brings out a lot of wonderful things about humanity and in many ways, I’m weirdly excited about the possibility of new innovations that often come out of times of uncertainty.
Have you experienced any mind-blowing creativity recently?
Having spoken at the Design Indaba Conference in February, I felt blown away by almost every speaker that I met there. I had the opportunity to meet women like Anna Talvi, Kathryn Larsen and Enni Kukka Tuomala who are working on suits and clothing for space, using seaweed as an architectural material and using empathy in design.
Finally, is there anything you’d like to say to a bunch of creatives on the internet?
Thank you to all of the creatives out there! Let’s keep pushing forward through this time and think of new ways to solve emerging problems related to what’s happening right now, as well as the many problems that continue to happen outside the spotlight.
Thanks again to Antya! You can learn more about her work here.